With U EP

Tri Angle; 2011

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Depending on which article or news story you read, Holy Other could hail from Manchester, Gothenburg, Stockport, or Berlin. The fact-shy producer is apparently now settled in Manchester, but there's a sense of disconnection that remains integral to his ghostly productions. There's a strong sense of loneliness in the swarm of sampled vocals that make up the spine of the tracks on With U, reflecting both in the way Holy Other treats his sources and the mixture of genres he pulls from.

Take the title track, which shuffles out from a poppy, electronic piano sample in a motif that is at once disarmingly gentle and slightly creepy. As skittering rhythms pan from left to right, a pitched-down vocal bathes the track in darkness, and "with you" is the only discernable lyric as the sample repeats. The track has a yearning sound, each element working to intensify that feeling, from the off-kilter piano line to the vaporous layers of reverb. That echoing atmosphere is abundant on the EP and has a knack for making Holy Other's production seem tantalizingly half-solid and transient.

"Touch" uses the same kind of tricks with a lithe vocal line at the heart of the track. This time, the voice sounds closer to the kind of manipulations Burial mined so successfully on Untrue. That kind of skewed affectation has been a common device in electronic music since then, but something about Holy Other's cloud of overlapping vocal samples gives it a different, more romantic feel. While that busier vocal work makes up the bulk of the track, an ominous bass line thunders deep in the mix, gliding slowly from note to note. The drop is one of the more noticeable signifiers from witch house and aligns Holy Other more strongly with other Tri Angle Records artists Balam Acab and oOoOO.

The glacial drag of those artists is reflected again on closing track "Feel Something", with its starkly contrasting bass and trebly keys. It shares the listlessness and detached atmosphere common in this scene, but once again Holy Other's use of vocals pulls the track somewhere unexpected. This time, the sample hews closer to its native pitch and feels all the more striking for it. Transplanted out of its original context, the latent sensuality and drama in the vocals are squeezed down to their stark essence.

On first listen, the haze of With U can seem pro forma, but diving deeper beneath the surface reveals a deceptively fragmented record made up of enticing titbits and interesting juxtapositions. It's a strangely affecting synthesis of sounds and marks Holy Other's short debut out as a darkly oppressive but ultimately rewarding piece of work.